Politician: David Cameron

Who else? And yet it all nearly went horribly wrong in a general
election whose nail-biting aftermath was much more gripping than
the rather flat campaign that had preceded it. On Friday, 7 May, as
the electorate awoke to discover that it had made nothing clearer
than its deep collective indecision, David Cameron proved himself a true statesman, as well as a
nimble political operator, by offering the Liberal Democrats a
coalition deal that - whatever its long-term fate - has already
changed the contours of British politics.

Rarely has a party leader assumed the mantle of prime minister
with such speed and consummate grace. Whitehall mandarins were
astonished by Cameron's instinctive grasp of what was needed.
Managing a single-party administration is hard enough: the first
coalition for more than six decades is another matter entirely. But
the new PM took it all in his stride, looking instantly at home in
Number Ten, at Prime Minister's Questions and talking to the
president in the Oval Office. Once again, the nation has a
blue-chip leader.

There have been hiccups: the departure of David Laws, the row
over school funding, unguarded remarks about Gaza and Pakistan.
There are tensions intrinsic to Cameron's alliance with the Lib
Dems: the warmth of his relationship with Nick Clegg is matched by the frostiness of the Tory right and
the unease felt by some Lib Dem ministers about the government's
brutal fiscal policy. In the next year, Cameron will implement a
ferocious round of spending cuts and plans a referendum for a
change to the electoral system in which he himself does not
believe.

Yet the score sheet is still overwhelmingly in his favour. In
only a few months, he has built a stable government from
unpromising materials and launched an economic recovery programme
that just might get us out of this fiscal hole. He has assembled a
cabinet of all the talents that makes new Labour look, well, old,
and the pretenders to Gordon Brown's crown seem flimsy by comparison. None of this
has happened in the way Cameron hoped when he became Tory leader
five years ago. Which makes it all the more remarkable.